Tag Archives: Roberta Damiani

On 11 and 12 June 2018 the Constitution Unit co-hosted two workshops with Rome LUISS university, the second of which was on ‘Bicameralism and the legislative process in the UK and Italy’. In this post Roberta Damiani summarises some of the themes from the day, and what conclusions can be drawn for those researching the work and influence of parliaments.

Studying the legislative process is not an easy task, and it becomes even more complex when done through the lens of bicameralism. Difficulties include the definitional issue of what constitutes influence on legislation, and the challenges of accurately reconstructing how two chambers of parliament work in practice and interact with each other. In the second day of events organised jointly by the Constitution Unit and LUISS University a well-attended workshop, held on June 12th in the Sala della Lupa in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, explored how to tackle this subject from both a methodological and a substantive point of view. Here I draw on some of the points raised during the workshop, in an attempt to stimulate debate on how to approach such topics in future work.

The comparative literature often attempts to rank national parliaments according to their policy-making powers. Usually, these stop at the formal powers that a legislature has – for instance, to introduce bills and to amend government legislation. Examples are the Parliamentary Powers Index compiled by Fish and Kroenig, and its weighted version proposed by Chernykh, Doyle and Power in 2016. These comparative studies can be very useful to have a broad overview of how formal legislative powers vary from one country to another. However, they also start to highlight some challenges of studying legislatures: when one moves down to the level of the individual country, reconstructing what actually goes on in a certain parliament tends to be much more complicated. Continue reading →

On 11 and 12 June 2018 the Constitution Unit co-hosted two workshops with Rome LUISS university, the first being on ‘The challenges of reforming upper houses in the UK and Italy’. The contributions of Unit Director Meg Russell and Carlo Fusaro of the University of Florence were summarised in the first two posts in this series. Here, Roberta Damiani summarises what was said by the other contributors.

Claudio Tucciarelli, Chamber of Deputies.

Claudio Tucciarelli discussed how Italian ‘perfect’ bicameralism, where the two chambers have the same powers and functions and are both directly elected (as explained here), was a ‘disappointing’ outcome that in the end emerged from the negotiations of the 1946 Constituent Assembly. Nevertheless, he argued that some of the accusations that are often made against Italian bicameralism are not true. For instance, it is generally said that the system is too slow and that the process to approve bills is too lengthy, but Tucciarelli argued that ‘good decisions are better than quick ones’, and he pointed out that the majority of bills in Italy are approved without the use of the navette procedure (shuttling bills back and forth between the chambers). Furthermore, he remarked that the 2016 reform proposal would have diminished the legitimacy of the Italian Senate. The lack of legitimacy is often a cause of controversy about second chambers (as argued by Meg Russell), and hence Renzi’s reform would have introduced problems of a different kind.

Francesca Rosa, Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law at the University of Foggia

Professor Rosa discussed the main hurdles to reforming Italian bicameralism. One obstacle is very long-term: simply that the complete symmetry of Italian bicameralism is now very long-standing. While the Chamber of Deputies and Senate always had the same legislative powers and functions, originally the 1948 republican Constitution predicted at least some minor differences between the two chambers, in terms of the duration of their terms (five years for the Chamber and six years for the Senate), and in terms of composition, as the Senate should have been elected ‘on a regional basis’. However, these differences were quickly nullified: in 1953, the terms of the two chambers were equalised to five years, and the electoral laws used to elect the Senate, which never went beyond using the regions as constituencies, did not result in meaningful regional representation This made the two chambers completely identical, and this parity has now been in place for decades – and as argued by Donald Shell, ‘inertia’ is in itself a reason why second chambers often continue to exist unreformed.Continue reading →

On 11 and 12 June 2018 the Constitution Unit co-hosted a workshop at Rome LUISS university, on ‘The challenges of reforming upper houses in the UK and Italy’. This is the second in a series of posts summarising the speakers’ contributions. Professor Carlo Fusaro, a leading proponent of Matteo Renzi’s failed Senate reform of 2016, reflects on why the proposals were defeated and what wider lessons can be learned from their failure.

In a previous blog, Constitution Unit Director Meg Russell set out some more general obstacles to bicameral reform. In this post, reflecting on the recent Italian experience, I argue that the challenges of reforming second chambers have changed, and grown, significantly in recent years.

Constitutional change is difficult by design. Transformation of those constitutional bodies which have a say in the decision making process of constitutional revisions is even more difficult, the most difficult of all. This is something we all have been acutely aware of for decades both in Italy and abroad.Continue reading →

Last month the Italian Constitutional Court declared several crucial elements of the ‘Italicum’ electoral system for the Chamber of Deputies, approved by parliament in 2015, to be unconstitutional. Further electoral reform is therefore now being discussed, ahead of an election that must take place by next spring at the latest. Roberta Damiani explains the background to the judgement and its implications.

On 25 January the Italian Constitutional Court announced its judgement on the latest electoral law for the lower chamber of Parliament (the Chamber of Deputies), promulgated by Matteo Renzi’s government and approved in 2015, known as the ‘Italicum’. While retaining some of its features, the Court declared that several of the Italicum’s most crucial elements are unconstitutional, and modified them accordingly. It effectively turned what would have been a majoritarian system into a proportional one.

Before examining this judgement in detail, we need to understand how it fitted into broader debates about the appropriate constitutional structure for Italy.

The Constitution of the Italian Republic, founded in 1946 in the wake of the experience of fascism, was based on the principle that power should be dispersed, in order to prevent the rise of another dictatorship. This was achieved through the creation of two coequal parliamentary chambers: not only did both have to agree all legislation; in addition, either could dismiss the government through a vote of no confidence. Some level of governability was achieved only by the fact that both chambers were directly elected through proportional representation: their compositions were almost identical, such that they rarely disagreed sharply with each other.

Nevertheless, by the 1980s there was a widespread perception that the dispersion of power had gone too far. The need for fundamental reforms became particularly acute after a major corruption scandal, known as ‘Tangentopoli’, that was uncovered in 1992 and led to an almost complete breakdown of the party system. In response, a new electoral system – the so-called ‘Mattarellum’ – was introduced in 1993, which reduced electoral proportionality in both chambers.

On 4 December Italians decisively rejected Matteo Renzi’s proposed constitutional reforms, which centred on reforming the Senate – leading to his resignation as Prime Minister. The international media widely reported this as a victory for populism. In this post Roberta Damiani and Meg Russell argue that the referendum result was more complex than that. It demonstrated the perils of referendums on detailed constitutional matters and in particular – with echoes of Nick Clegg’s experience in the UK – of attempted second chamber reform.

Italian ‘perfect’ bicameralism has dodged another bullet. After a long, fragmented, and highly personalised referendum campaign, on 4 December the Italian electorate voted against Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s constitutional reform by 59 per cent to 41 per cent, on a turnout of 65 per cent. The main elements of the reform would have been to drastically cut the powers of the upper chamber (the Senate), reduce its membership from 315 to 100, and turn it from a directly elected chamber into an indirectly-elected one, comprising representatives of the regions. Vincenzo Scarpetta has previously described what else the reform entailed on this blog.

Opinion polls over the last few months showed a shift towards a No outcome. The latest, published before the two-week ‘electoral silence’, indicated that 54 per cent of respondents would vote against the reform. This time, the polls showed the correct outcome. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who had linked the passage of this reform to his government’s survival, resigned the following day. In an emotional speech delivered on the evening of the defeat, he claimed: ‘I wanted to get rid of some seats in Italian politics. I failed, and hence the only seat I can get rid of is my own’.

Many commentators described the possibility of a No victory as the third anti-establishment vote of the year, following the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election. The main reason for this interpretation was that Renzi, a little too confident of the merits of his reform, highly personalised the campaign, and bet his political career on it. This naturally meant that his opponents would vote against him, and turned the referendum into a protest vote against the government. Renzi eventually personalised the loss just as much as the campaign: ‘To all my friends from the Yes front I say that you didn’t lose. I lost’, he said in his speech.

Individual electoral registration (IER) has been a huge project, requiring co-ordination between the Cabinet Office, Government Digital Service, Electoral Commission and electoral registration officers in local authorities. On January 25 representatives from these four bodies discussed the challenges they faced and how the project is being brought to a successful conclusion at a Constitution Unit seminar. Roberta Damiani and Laëtitia Nakache offer an overview.

Individual electoral registration (IER) has brought about a significant change in how British electors register to vote. The emphasis is on the term ‘individual’. Previously, one person in every household was responsible for registering everyone who lived at that address; now, with IER, each person is required to register individually. Designing and implementing such a system was a challenge, not only from a human point of view but also from a technological one, as it required a huge amount of data to be digitised and processed. But it also offers exciting opportunities to make citizens more engaged in the democratic process. This blog highlights the key issues debated at an event about IER hosted by The Constitution Unit on 25 January and chaired by Dr Alan Renwick.

The UK is far from the only country with a long-standing controversy over the composition and powers of its second chamber. In this post Roberta Damiani provides an update on the latest attempt to reform the Italian Senate. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is proposing to significantly reduce the Senate’s powers, and to move from direct to indirect elections, but it is far from certain that he will be successful.

The House of Lords has recently come under the spotlight for challenging the elected chamber on tax credit cuts, reviving the never-ending debate about the appropriate powers of a second chamber. But the UK is not the only European country experiencing such controversy: in Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s government is pursuing radical Senate reform. There too, both the powers and the composition of the second chamber are at stake. And there too, reformers may find that achieving major change is harder than they first imagined.

The starting point for the debate in Italy is a feature of the country’s political system that is almost unique among parliamentary democracies: so-called ‘perfect’ bicameralism. That is, the two parliamentary chambers have exactly the same powers as each other – including on financial matters, and even with respect to votes of confidence in the government. Both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate also share the legitimacy of direct election: the latter currently consists of 315 elected members, plus a few life senators, who are either former Presidents of the Republic or highly accomplished citizens appointed by the President.

The Constitution Unit in the Department of Political Science at University College London is the UK’s leading research body on constitutional change.

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